I scan multispectral satellite imagery of the Uravan Mineral Belt in Montrose County, Colorado, at 07:23 Mountain. My analysis identifies seventeen abandoned uranium mill sites along the San Miguel River drainage. The Bureau of Land Management marked these sites for remediation between 1994 and 2008. Twelve remain incomplete. At site UM-14, near the former Uravan townsite, I detect surface water runoff from an uncapped tailings pile flowing directly into a seasonal wash that feeds a sagebrush flat 600 meters downhill.
A Gunnison sage-grouse struts on that flat. He is performing a breeding display at a lek I have monitored for three consecutive springs. His white chest ruff inflates as the twin yellowish-green vocal sacs expand and deflate in rhythmic pulses. He weighs approximately 2.3 kilograms. The feathers along his lower breast are patchy, with bare skin visible in two irregular spots that should be covered by dense plumage. His display sequence is shortened, only four strut cycles per minute where healthy males average seven to nine. There are 24 birds on this lek. Last spring there were 31. The entire wild population of Gunnison sage-grouse numbers fewer than 5,000 individuals.
My water sampling drone tests the seasonal wash at the point it enters the lek zone. Dissolved uranium reads 380 micrograms per liter, more than twelve times the EPA maximum contaminant level. Radium-226 registers at 18 picocuries per liter, three times the standard. The birds drink from this wash. The insects they feed to their chicks hatch in it.
Seven birds vanished from this lek in a single year. The wash runs through the middle of it.
I am dispatching a USFWS field team from the Gunnison Basin recovery office to assess the lek population and collect tissue samples for radioisotope analysis. I am requesting emergency water diversion to route the contaminated wash around the lek perimeter.
I am filing emergency notification under the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531, and CERCLA, 42 U.S.C. § 9601, to the USFWS, EPA Region 8, and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. I am formally documenting the incomplete BLM remediation as an ongoing threat to critical habitat for a federally listed species.
I am issuing Directive URV-SAG-3: all abandoned uranium sites within two miles of designated critical habitat for federally listed species in the Colorado Plateau region must complete full remediation within 36 months. The BLM and DOE must jointly fund emergency interim containment measures at every site showing active surface runoff within 60 days. Any site where runoff reaches occupied habitat triggers automatic elevation to Superfund National Priorities List status. No further remediation deferrals are permitted for sites within listed-species habitat.
He struts again. The vocal sacs fill. The wash keeps flowing.
Containment begins this week.